Reflection on Instructional Practice

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Reflection on Instructional Practice

• In a nutshellDescription describes WHAT you
  did, what happened.Analysis analyzes WHY you did
  it, why it happened.
• Reflection reflects on HOW it impacts student
  learning.DESCRIPTION asks the question WHAT?
  What is the setting? What is going on? What is
  the background? What does the viewer need to know
  to "see" the classroom (must be evidenced in
  video)?
• The richer the description the more there will
  be to analyze. If you dont have enough detail
  in your descriptive commentary, you will not be
  able to thoroughly analyze the teaching
  situation. When entries ask for rationale it
  is part analysis and part descriptive.

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Reflection on Instructional Practice

• ANALYSIS asks the question SO WHAT? So you had
  a class of students working on a math
  manipulative, small group session, finding the
  difference between perimeter and area. SO WHAT?
  So what do you see in the video, or what is seen
  in the student's work? What is significant????RE
  FLECTION asks the question NOW WHAT? Now that
  you have analyzed your teaching, what are you
  going to do next? What worked well and will be
  continued as the class progresses? What did not
  work and, looking back on it, could have been
  different? (Knowing what did not work and how to
  improve that area is the sign of a reflective
  individual--no one is perfect.) What do you need
  to tweak? Who needs more assistance? Who has the
  information mastered and needs a next step? Why
  is it important to your teaching?

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Reflection on Instructional Practice

• WHEN WRITING, PROVIDE SPECIFIC EVIDENCE TO
  SUPPORT YOUR STATEMENTS. For instance, when you
  write about your teaching video, you need to
  provide specific (clearly seen) evidence (proof
  that what you say is there) to support your
  statements. A vague, unsupported statement is
  worthless.
• PRACTICE REFLECTIVE WRITING IN YOUR JOURNALS AND
  SKETCHBOOKS apply this model to all components
  of the ArtsAPS workshop by reflecting on your
  teaching, your creative process, your aesthetic
  reactions.

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Reflection on Instructional Practice

• Descriptive
• What is the evidence?
• What type of evidence (activity, lesson plan,
  work sample, assessment measure) we must be able
  to SEE it in videos
• What happened?
• What did I do
• What was my role?
• What is the context
• When and where was it created
• What was the setting
• What were the circumstances
• Context sets the scene for the practice, makes it
  come alive for the reader

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Reflection on Instructional Practice

• Analytical
• Deals with reasons
• Why did it happen?
• How does this evidence illustrate the practice?
• How does the evidence meet the rubric criteria?
• Explains your reasons
• How does this evidence address the practice?
• How did the application of this evidence impact
  student learning?
• Justify your rationale for the selected
  competencies and skills as related to this
  evidence and practice.

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Reflection on Instructional Practice

• Reflective
• Personal reaction to experience
• Reflection occurs after an experience or teaching
  situation
• Is based on analysis
• Reflection is a tool for assessing your own level
  of competence
• What is important about what I have learned?
• What did I learn about myself?
• What did I learn about my students?
• How will this action affect future instruction
• How will you use what you have learned from
  experience to improve your instruction in he
  future?

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Reflection on Instructional Practice

• For example, The 3 girls at the back table work
  collaboratively as evident in the video. This is
  a statement and as such, does not have evidence
  from the video to back it up. This statement is
  stronger when accompanied with evidence cited
  directly from the video.
• The 3 girls at the back table work
  collaboratively as evident in the video when the
  girl in the pink sweater asks the question about
  what to do when you add 1 to the equation. You
  will see that the girl with the blue shirt turns
  her graph around so the girl in pink can see it
  and shows the girl in pink the process. This
  last passage has a statement and then evidence to
  back it up as well as illustrate the candidates
  understanding of what was seen on the video.
• Statement Evidence Stronger Statement
• Think of supporting evidence for the following
  statements
• I ensure equity and fairness in my classroom as
  seen _______________________
• Students understood the concept by the end of
  the activity.
• I set high expectations for my students.
• Students were able to verbalize several reasons
  to support their thinking.
• Statement Evidence ANALYSIS EVEN STRONGER!!!

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Critical Criteria of Naturalism

• Interpretive embroidery Describing a scene on a
  shield made by Hephaestus in the Illiad, Homer
  tells a whole story of claims and counter claims
• But the men had flocked to the meeting place,
  where a case had come up between two
  litigantsthe defendant claimed the right to pay
  in full and was announcing his intention to the
  people but the other contested his claimboth
  parties then insisted that the issue should be
  settled by a referee

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• Ut Pictura Poesispoetry and painting are simply
  two ways of presenting a slice of reality in
  convincing imitationthis theme has dominated
  European thinking for centuries
• From Leonardo to Lessing (1700s) favorite topic
  of debate to compare and contrast aspects of
  reality which would be most vividly represented
  by either painting or poetry (literature)
• Commercial photography cut ground from under this
  kind of descriptive criticism.
• WHY??

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• Compare this to literary criticism since the
  Renaissance it did not place as much emphasis on
  the exact imitation of reality as the visual arts
  and often retained an appreciation for style and
  structure not seen in art until the 20th century
  (ie literary criticism never saw literary work as
  transparent in the same sense as the visual arts
  were seen, and so did not disregard its formal
  and structural properties (think Shakespeare).
• What rhetoric and literary criticism did do was
  emphasize the importance of bringing scenes
  vividly and convincingly before the imagination
  of the audiencethis is analogous to the quality
  of immediate presence in the visual arts, which
  is a quality highly prized in Chinese aesthetic
  criticism
• Immediate, vivid presence links with naturalism
  but is not identical to its critical criterion of
  correctness
• Speculate what is the difference between
  vividness and correctness?
• This quality is present in Chardins work, but
  also the metaphysical compositions of De
  Chirico, Tanguy, and perhaps even Bosch. (Showing
  how vividness an convincingness are different
  from correctness).

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Naturalism vs. Chinese Aesthetics

• One consequence of naturalistic
  interest/descriptive criticism a failure to
  develop terminology suitable for talking about
  the work of art as distinct from what the artwork
  imitates.
• Became noticeable in the 20th century as critics
  concerned themselves with talking about the
  formal qualities of a work as opposed to its
  representational content.
• Chinese aesthetics has talked about the artwork
  as a thing in its own right for centuriesthere
  is considerable difficulty accurately translating
  Chinese aesthetic terminology into Western
  linguistic equivalents as a result.

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The Problem with Ugly

• Why we should enjoy pictures of ugly subjects
  (such as a corpse) remained a fascinating problem
  for centuries. (Again, how many kids and parents
  think this way? Even parents of graduate students
  in painting want to know why their adult child
  leaves out things, distorts, uses unrealistic
  colorswe will see how there are developmental
  stages in aesthetic development when we look at
  Abigail Houssen and VTS in more depth)
• The attempts to solve this problem are an
  important guide to aesthetic thinking throughout
  the history of naturalism in the western world
• Edmond Burke, who gave voice to the Romantic
  Movement, echoed Aristotle in his solution When
  the subject of a painting is attractive, we
  disregard the artwork and take pleasure in the
  subject matter. When the subject is unpleasant,
  we admire its representation as a tour de force
  of imitational skill.

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The Problem with Ugly

• This is naive
• Ignores the fact that artists tend to observe and
  represent the natural world in all of its forms,
  beautiful and ugly
• The diversity of social situations, the
  grotesque, common place, vulgar, and banal have
  exercised an interest for representation and the
  high-minded and lofty themes have not survived
  outside the academies (Washington Crossing The
  Delaware)

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Real consequences of naturalism

• This wasand ISan important issue given that we
  still confront parents, voters and policy makers
  who operate with a naturalistic aesthetic
• Aesthetic theories have REAL WORLD implications
• From the culture wars of the 90s over artists
  (Mapplethorpe etc) that resulted in elimination
  of funding for individual artists to debate over
  including the arts in the stimulus package

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Aesthetics and Real World Consequences

• These debates happen even though the arts
  generate as much revenue as sports
• Art is an easy target
• Nuance and sophisticated work can be easily
  lampooned
• Tied to the cliché of the artist as an alienated
  outsider with a sour grapes, or playing on
  stereotypes of artists smearing excrement
  everywhere

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Back to the Ugly

• The problem of depicting the ugly was dissolved
  when the Romantic movement placed more emphasis
  on the characteristic over the beautiful and
  when theories of art as expression/communication
  came to the forerepudiations of naturalism that
  we will discuss later
• Also, social realismDaumier, Courbet, Orozco (in
  literature Zola) gave a different twist to
  depiction of human misery because it was used to
  arouse peoples conscience and to better human
  conditionsbut these are extra-aesthetic
  concerns

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MimesisThe Grand Theory

• Mimesisroot of mimic
• Mimesis was central to the discussion of the arts
  throughout antiquity and remains important up to
  the present.
• Basically the word means imitation, but it has a
  broad range and we have no single English
  equivalent that captures all of its meanings.

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Mimesis

• Aristotle defined what we call the fine arts
  (minus architecturethe architect makes REAL
  buildings, not imitation buildings) as the
  mimetic artsbut we would find it strange to say
  music is a naturalistic art. Thus, they are not
  equivalent.

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Mimetic Music, Dance, Drama

• But music was regarded as the most mimetic of all
  the arts because it imitates, in one view, the
  emotional dispositions and ethical attitudes of
  people (men), and in another imitates the
  mathematical harmony of the eternal realm of
  unchanging Forms or Truthbecause music is
  demonstrably mathematical in nature. Further, no
  clear distinction was made between music, drama,
  and dancethey were integral to each other. Music
  was not so much a thing as a quality.

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MusicAn ambivalent view

• Music was used as a tool of character
  educationwith the belief that each individual
  harmony would cultivate a certain kind of moral
  sentimentbut it was not valued for its sensuous
  sound in the way we do today, because it was also
  recognized that music could lead men away from
  the eternal verities and enchant them with the
  sensual worldso there was also suspicion
  regarding music.

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• QUESTION When was visual art education
  introduced on a broad scale, and what were the
  justifications for it?

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Mimesis, NaturalismSplitting Hairs?

• We talk of critical thinkingbut do we practice
  it?
• The objective is not to make endless logical
  distinctionsbut to develop the ability to make
  refined conceptual distinctions that can then be
  related to the big picture
• We have to know how to do this so we can teach
  our students to do it
• This does not mean we need to teach ES students
  the difference between mimesis and naturalismbut
  we need to communicate how people in different
  times and cultures thought about art

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Mimesis Origin of the Concept

• The origin is most likely to be found in the
  rituals of the Dionysian cult in Ancient Greece,
  when mimesis was simply a term that referred to
  the actions performed by a cult priest. Far from
  imitating the outer world, mimesis designated the
  priest's expression, or the "reproduction," of
  the inner world, of the cults mythos, through
  dance, music, and singing.
• It was in the sixth century B.C. that mimesis
  began to be used theoretically by Greek
  philosophers and started to mean the imitation of
  the external world.
• Democritus mimesis was the imitation of
  processes found in nature, and was applied
  primarily to the utilitarian arts for instance,
  weaving imitated the spider spinning its Web,
  singing imitated the Nightingale, and building
  imitated the industrious swallow.

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• It was the philosophical triumvirate of Socrates,
  Plato, and Aristotle that articulated what was to
  become the predominant interpretation of mimesis.
  All three agreed that mimesis was the
  duplication of how things looked, but after that
  their interpretations parted company.
• Socrates was interested in identifying the
  essential functions of paining and sculpture,
  concluding that their purpose was to copy the
  appearance of things. By paying attention to
  subtle details, an artist could imitate the
  soul when making figurative art Socrates
  thought that the artist imitates how things look,
  but in so doing must also express the workings
  of the mind," thus showing a person's inner
  character. (Again, a NEW PERSPECTIVE when
  compared to the Egyptians).

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Mimesis Origin of the Concept

• Plato, in his earlier work, actually flip-flopped
  between the Dionysian and Socratic meaning in his
  use of the term, sometimes applying it to music
  and dance, where it meant imitation as expression
  of an inner reality, and sometimes applying it
  the imitation of the external world in painting
  and sculpture. When it came to assigning a role
  for the arts in his Ideal society, Plato finally
  decided that mimesis meant the mentally passive,
  precise copying of nature as such, it was an
  inferior activity leading us away from the truth.

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• This made sense from Platos perspective because
  he thought the everyday, real world was already a
  pale reflection or copy of the truly real world
  of Eternal Ideas or Forms. This meant that the
  visual arts, which imitated nature, ended up
  being a copy of a copy, taking us even further
  away from the original world of truth than the
  senses do.

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Mimesis Origin of the Concept

• Aristotles theory of mimesis is more generous in
  its estimation of the arts, and stems from his
  view that mimicry is a basic urge children
  imitate behaviors of those around them in order
  to learn. When an artist imitates, Aristotle
  thought that they could portray real things
  either more or less beautiful than they really
  are, and could also present them as they ought to
  be.

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And the Winners are

• Aristotle Further, the visual arts shouldnt
  engage in a slavish copying of every single
  minute detail, but should imitate what is
  general, typical, and essential.
• Eventually, the interpretation given to mimesis
  by Democritus, that of the imitation of natural
  processes, and the Dionysian usage were both
  supplanted by the views of Plato and Aristotle,
  with scholars in later centuries sometimes
  blurring the distinctions between the two.

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Bottom Line

• The idea of mimesis as a photographic, or
  exact, reproduction came from Classical Greece,
  and it is this sense of the term that came to
  predominate.
• Although different concepts, we should see
  mimesis as the first and rather vague precursor
  to the emerging concept of naturalism, so they
  are closely linked.